Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Learning To Make Furniture, with help from youtube”.
This year i’ve been very interested in learning about furniture design in construction. You saw my last exploration in that when i did the cnc flat pack mid-century modern desk. I’Ve still got that desk and i still use it and it’s very cool, but i want to learn more now. I’Ve been particularly inspired by two youtubers there’s chris salamoni from four eyes: furniture and sean boyd from seanvoid made. This you’ll find links to their channels down below.
Now they both have a very a somewhat similar aesthetic, which is uh based off mid-century modern. But it’s got nice clean lines and somewhat subtle angles or or maybe extreme angles, depending on which piece you look at, but i like their style and, more importantly, they’ve been sharing how they design and build these pieces of furniture. So i decided to jump in and give it a try for this project. I actually need a dog bowl holder for my dog finley he’s old and his dog food bowl shouldn’t be on the floor and well i’m just gon na make it because i want something to make.
So i hopped into fusion 360 and i started doing shape studies. If you look at these two designs, the one on the left, i didn’t like so much, i felt like the the legs were overpowering visually and the one on the right. I actually liked a lot. It reminded me of a television and it just seemed like the the weight of the shapes was balanced.
Better. I don’t know, i’m not a designer, i don’t know how to describe it, but it just seemed to be more like cohesive, and i don’t know i like. Looking at it better, so i picked that one at that point in time i decided to put away fusion 360 and to do the rest of it uh.
Just using you know, drawings and math and kind of a standard set of power tools. I’Ve got a table, saw and a drill and a jigsaw, and that’s i mean that’s really the bulk of what i used. The first major part was getting this circle cut it needed to be smaller than the bowl, so i couldn’t just trace the bowl. I made this quick little rig so that i could draw a perfect circle. Then i drilled some holes and cut it out with a jigsaw.
The most difficult parts of this are going to be these miter joints that are not exactly 90 degrees. I’Ve never done these. I’Ve never figured them out and i’ve got this box. I have to do now that has obtuse angles and acute angles. Luckily, chris salamoni has put out a video showing how he does it, and i learned how to hold the wood upright to saw it to be able to get those angles right, because you need some angles that are, you know, maybe different than what your saw can Handle when it came time to glue together the main body, i didn’t really have any way to hold it.
Sean boyd has a cool video about these little things he uses to hold together. Funky angles like this, but i didn’t have any of those. I didn’t feel like making any so i just used the painters, tape method and it worked pretty well so after i cut all of these angles and i started putting it together, i noticed i wasn’t going to be able to do um. You know you can glue together your miter joint and usually you would put like a biscuit in there or like a festool domino or even just a dowel or something inside that joint to help hold it together. But the wood was really thin and i didn’t think i could do that without just totally destroying it.
So what i opted to do is, i think it’s called a spline where you cut a groove in it, and then you slide in another piece of wood and glue it in there, and it holds that joint makes it more robust. I decided to make mine out of some red oak that just slides into this plywood, which is baltic birch, and it looks okay now it’s time for the legs i didn’t want to make some kind of a complicated jig for my table saw to be able to Cut these legs, so i just used my jigsaw. I just went nice and slow and careful and got the lines straight. I glued those together and set them aside. Then it was time to assemble everything and put the legs onto the main body, and at this point in time i didn’t feel like just glue was enough, but i also didn’t want any screws in it at this point because i hadn’t used any yet so.
Instead, i drilled not quite all the way through the plywood, so you couldn’t see it from the top and i put in some dowels and glued them in place. So there’s no screws on this entire thing. It’S all held together, just wood to wood connections. So now it’s all together and i’m standing back, i’m looking at this thing and i have to say i’m just i’m so excited it came together.
It looks how i imagined it. It seems solid. This is amazing.
All it needs now is a little bit of finish. So i decided to put a couple coats of stain on it and then a couple coats of poly acrylic satin, with a little bit of sanding in between each so that it was nice and smooth. I have to say i consider this project a resounding success. I love the way it looks and for my first try at making a piece of furniture without using the cnc machine, it turned out incredible. I want to thank sean boyd and chris salamoni for their tutorials and their inspiration, and and it’s incredible the things you learn. Building something like this, i mean i, i had seen all their videos and there are just kind of some no-brainer things, though, that you have to actually try something to learn.
So here are a few things that i learned during this process: uh first off it’s kind of difficult to get that angle perfect on a table saw you really need to get one of these little digital angle. Finders, the the dial on the front of your table saw is not very accurate and so using one of these digital angle, finders will help cutting a circle with a jigsaw is a lot harder than it looks. I really just flew into that thinking. It was going to be the easiest part, but whenever i was done that circle just wasn’t perfect and i’m used to cnc stuff, i’m used to just seeing a perfect circle.
So that was a bit frustrating and took quite a bit of sanding with a dremel tool to get it to where i at least felt it was okay to look at. I noticed on one piece that i cut. It wasn’t perfectly parallel all the way around, and that was because there was some slop in my sled. If you look here, it barely looks like any wiggle, but that translates to you know up to two or three millimeters on one end, so i need to remake my sled. Here’S a a good video from david pachuto on how to make a sled for your table saw.
Another thing i learned is that edge banding though it looks so easy when you watch other people. Do it on youtube, is kind of a pain to get it to look good and not like horrible and cheap. You iron it on there and then you have to trim it and if you just use a razor, you don’t always get a perfectly straight trim, especially if your razor’s kind of dull, like mine, was, i didn’t, want to run to the store just to get a Razor i should have, though, so i think, if i do this again do edge banding again, i’m going to probably get an edge like one of those little trim routers with a flush trim bit or something to try to get that smooth.
You know perfectly even uh edge on the edge banding and even something like cutting the little corners on the edge banding was more difficult than it looks in the videos, but hey you know you can only get better if you try these things out. I learned so much. I love the way. This thing looks and finley seems to like it, so there you go thanks for watching, give us a big thumbs up and be sure to subscribe. If you want to see more projects like this on the make youtube channel, you .